In the News 03.07.17 : Today’s Articles of Interest from Around the Internets

Nowhere Mag

An airplane is the perfect, and perhaps the only, place to actually read Monocle, the globe-trotting lifestyle magazine founded in 2007 by Tyler Brûlé, a Canadian editor and erstwhile war correspondent. Its logo, an “M” with a twisted loop inscribed in a circle, lurks at airport terminal bookstores all over the world, the magazine’s glossy black cover—which the late David Carr likened to “a slab of printed dark Belgian chocolate”—conveying a placeless, easily translated sort of luxury. Inside, one encounters articles on Canadian soft power, Latin American soap operas, and Finnish domestic architecture: the casual reading of an armchair diplomat.

Over the years, Monocle has become as much a status symbol as reading material. Its editor is one of the world’s foremost lifestyle auteurs, a tastemaker of late capitalism and “a Martha Stewart for the global elite,” per New York magazine. Brûlé has promoted his personal version of the good life via high-profile columns in T magazine and, more recently, the Financial Times, where he reflects on travel etiquette and philosophizes about “relaxation” for the one percent. Monocle’s tote bags, which come with the $130 annual ten-issue subscription price, mark an itinerant tribe of 80,000 who may identify more with the magazine than with the country on their passports.

How Cult Leaders Brainwash Followers for Total Control

I began my formal research in 1999, eight years after battling my way out of a secret, so-called Marxist-Leninist group whose leader controlled my life in its most intimate details. He determined what I wore: a version of the advice in John Molloy’s bestseller Dress for Success (1975), featuring tailored blue suits and floppy red silk bowties. More significantly, he decided when I could marry, and whether I might have children. The leader’s decrees were passed down via memos typed on beige notepaper and hand-delivered to me by my ‘contact’. Because I was a low-ranked member, the leader remained unknown to me.

I joined this Minneapolis-based group, called The Organization (The O) believing I was to contribute to their stated goal of social justice, a value instilled in me by my family. However, what I actually did revolved around, first, being a factory machinist tending numerical control lathes and, then, grunt work in the group’s wholegrain bakery (we did at least make good bread) and, finally, writing business computer programs. The fact that these tasks seemed oddly disconnected from any strategy for social change did not escape my notice. I regularly questioned (until I learned not to) how all this was leading to justice for the poor and the powerless. A stern ‘struggle with the practice’ was the only answer I ever received, and back to my labours I would go, like Boxer the horse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), hardworking but still unenlightened as to the ultimate goal.

The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur

Pronounce the word artist, to conjure up the image of a solitary genius. A sacred aura still attaches to the word, a sense of one in contact with the numinous. “He’s an artist,” we’ll say in tones of reverence about an actor or musician or director. “A true artist,” we’ll solemnly proclaim our favorite singer or photographer, meaning someone who appears to dwell upon a higher plane. Vision, inspiration, mysterious gifts as from above: such are some of the associations that continue to adorn the word.

Yet the notion of the artist as a solitary genius—so potent a cultural force, so determinative, still, of the way we think of creativity in general—is decades out of date. So out of date, in fact, that the model that replaced it is itself already out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, and has been since about the turn of the millennium, one that’s in the process of reshaping what artists are: how they work, train, trade, collaborate, think of themselves and are thought of—even what art is—just as the solitary-genius model did two centuries ago. The new paradigm may finally destroy the very notion of “art” as such—that sacred spiritual substance—which the older one created.

Before we thought of artists as geniuses, we thought of them as artisans. The words, by no coincidence, are virtually the same. Art itself derives from a root that means to “join” or “fit together”—that is, to make or craft, a sense that survives in phrases like the art of cooking and words like artful, in the sense of “crafty.” We may think of Bach as a genius, but he thought of himself as an artisan, a maker. Shakespeare wasn’t an artist, he was a poet, a denotation that is rooted in another word for make. He was also a playwright, a term worth pausing over. A playwright isn’t someone who writes plays; he is someone who fashions them, like a wheelwright or shipwright.

The Age of Banter

‘It’s the most fucking ridiculous story, isn’t it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria.” Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. “I mean, it was fucking 8am,” he told an Australian website soon afterwards, “and the last fucking club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. We’ll blag our way on to a fucking boat and go dolphin watching.”

But when the boat sailed so far that Cyprus disappeared from view, Ellis explained, they started to worry. “Why are we so far from land?” they asked the crew. “We’re fucking miles away and we’ve got no fucking wifi.” Something, Ellis said, had been lost in translation; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the resort’s party pilgrims had gone terribly awry. The crew wasn’t taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval base in the city of Tartus, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was, nonetheless, a story that had legs. “Hungover lads’ boat trip boob lands them in Syria,” wahey-ed the Mirror; “British holidaymakers board ‘party boat’ in Ayia Napa – and end up in war-torn SYRIA,” guffawed the Express. If you saw these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon landing; interrogation at the hands of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a hot meal, a quick tour of the area, and a good night’s sleep, spots on the next fishing vessel headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the boat in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Guy Fieri Just Wants You To Eat Healthy, Donkey Sauce Be Damned

The Guy Fieri from TV — the gregarious one who pops up on The Food Network seemingly every two hours to beam over decadent dishes or put the shama lama in the ding dong of his own recipes — is the same Guy Fieri who answers the phone at his Santa Rosa home on a Tuesday, just a few hours before the big family dinner at his dad’s next door.

“Game on, baby,” he says. “Go for it.”

Constantly on the road for charity events, sponsored dog-and-pony shows, and TV series shoots, and in possession of a signature look and gonzo personality, Fieri has been cast by food media types as a divisive figure. To some, he’s a spiky-haired bro who “built a business empire on the very premise that he’s a human punch line” (Grub Street); to others, he’s “the hero we need” (Playboy). But speaking to you over the phone from his California complex — the same house he’s lived in since opening Johnny Garlic’s, his first pre-fame restaurant, in the mid-1990s — Fieri is like your favorite uncle, an excitable mover-and-shaker who genuinely wants to be everyone’s friend because maybe that’ll make the world a little better, cultural impact be damned.

So which is it? Fieri insists he’s still that chill California dude from the 2005 Food Network audition tape (only now, woke Katy Perry can impersonate him on Instagram) who embarked on an everlasting tour of US restaurants with the debut of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives on April 23, 2007. While Fieri’s critiques of dishes on “Triple D” remain uniquely inoffensive, so as to soothe viewers’ minds (e.g., his assessments of sauce range from “wow” to “dynamite”), the America around the show, and Fieri’s bravado, have changed drastically.

To find out what the second-season winner of The Next Food Network Star has learned after 10 years on the road about food, fans, and himself, I phoned him up intent on doing something few reporters have dared to do: take him seriously.